Anthropic publishes Economic Index report on usage 'cadences'

Anthropic published the latest instalment of its Economic Index, the recurring series tracking how people use Claude, this time focused on “cadences” — the rhythms of usage across the day, week and calendar rather than a snapshot of task categories. Using hourly-resolution sampling, an upgrade from the previous seven-day windows, Anthropic found personal conversations rose from around 35% of use on weekdays to nearly half at weekends, while work tasks such as backend architecture and API debugging fell over the same period. Within a day, business correspondence peaked mid-morning, recipe requests spiked 2.3 times the average around 6pm, and requests for sleep advice peaked near 5am. Around calendar events, the pattern was sharper still: tax-related queries rose to eight times the average level just before the US filing deadline in April.

The report also linked usage logs to roughly 9,700 survey respondents through a privacy-preserving matching process, finding that over a third expected AI to handle “most or nearly all” of their work tasks within 12 months, and that close to 60% expected AI’s capability to improve to a materially higher band over the same period. Higher-wage occupations showed proportionally heavier use during nights and weekends, and women — a minority of the linked sample — showed a lower share of fully automated (as opposed to iterative, human-directed) usage than men.

The findings added behavioural detail to Anthropic’s broader argument, made across the Economic Index series through 2026, that AI use was becoming woven into ordinary work and personal routines rather than remaining a novelty confined to specific tasks.